Showdown in Nashville
For all the GOP’s talk of “political retaliation” against their presumptive presidential candidate, the real retaliation unfolded on Thursday on the front lines of the fight for gun safety in Nashville, Tennessee. Following a tragic shooting at the Covenant School in the city that left six victims dead, including three adults and three nine-year old children, more than 1,000 students marched on the Capitol building during a session of the state’s House of Representatives. The students, in the tradition of the Parkland and MSU students, went to protest the state’s utter inaction on gun safety in the wake of these shootings.
Three Democratic state House members, Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson, joined in the protest from the floor of the chamber. For this transgression of the rules, the House, controlled by a GOP supermajority, voted to expel Jones and Pearson, who are both black. Johnson, who is white, narrowly avoided expulsion.
The move stunned and outraged observers, with many decrying the expulsions as racist and anti-democratic. It has also drawn the attention of national Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, who stated,
Today’s expulsion of lawmakers who engaged in peaceful protest is shocking, undemocratic and without precedent. Rather than debate the merits of the issue, these Republican lawmakers have chosen to punish, silence and expel duly-elected representatives of the people of Tennessee.
In today’s piece, we’ll take a deeper dive into what has now become a crisis of democracy in Tennessee, beginning with a review of the lack of gun laws and the stranglehold the GOP has on state legislative representation. We’ll then look at the expulsions and why they are unprecedented, wrong and likely not only to backfire but to fail to keep these legislators out. Finally, we’ll explore what this signals for the state of our country and in particular for Republicans who continue to control the majority of our states’ governments.
Tennessee is seriously lax on guns
Nearly 1,400 people die each year in Tennessee by guns, making it the 10th highest rate in the nation. There are few requirements for gun purchases, including no background checks or training for handgun buyers. The state allows permitless carry, even for concealed weapons, for anyone over 21, and there are no red flag laws to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous individuals.
Last year, Republicans moved in the opposite direction from gun safety, with proposed bills lowering the handgun purchase and carry age to 18 and allowing the most dangerous guns, including AR-15s, to be carried in public.
This was the environment in which the mass school shooting occurred, and which has driven Tennessee students to take to the streets and to protest at the Capitol.
Gerrymandered to the hilt
The Tennessee state House has 99 seats, with the state broken up by maps drawn by the Republican legislative supermajority. The maps are designed to dilute Democratic representation, both in the state and in its Congressional delegation, something that the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution used to protect against, before the Supreme Court began gutting voting rights, beginning with its Shelby County decision knocking out federal preauthorization for new maps.
The House district maps in Tennessee are a blatant and unapologetic gerrymander. Here’s what House District 13 looked like, for example, when it was proposed by Republicans:
The maps often force Democratic representatives to run against each other. That is in fact what happened with state Rep. Gloria Johnson, one of the three House members who protested and faced expulsion. Her district was redrawn so that her residence was in a new district, No. 15, forcing her to run as a white woman in a majority Black district. This she refused to do.
“I have longtime said I will not run in House District 15. I won’t run against Sam [McKenzie], and I won’t run in House District 15,” said Johnson. “Since I’ve been in politics, that’s been a minority seat, and there’s no way that I would try to change that.” She said she would rather move to a new district than try to take a minority seat.
The result of all these and other shenanigans is that the Tennessee House GOP maintains a supermajority of white representatives. And yesterday, they used that supermajority to vote, along party lines, to expel two Black House members but to retain the white one.
Let’s take a look at what they claimed justified the expulsion.
No, it wasn’t January 6 all over again.
As Judd Legum of Popular.Info noted, when the students in Nashville began their protest, right-wing media portrayed it as a “storming” of the Capitol that, as the Daily Mail claimed, was an “ongoing insurrection.”
But the protest was peaceful. As Legum summarized,
No arrests
No violence
No injuries
No property damage
It was a peaceful protest
Mostly students.
During the protest, three Democratic members—Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson—approached the well without being recognized, and while using a bullhorn, they led the student protestors in gun control chants, violating the rules of the chamber. The Speaker recessed the House and ordered the gallery where the students were gathered cleared. They left willingly and without incident.
Pearson told reporters Thursday that the three lawmakers had broken “a House rule because we’re fighting for kids who are dying from gun violence and people in our communities who want to see an end to the proliferation of weaponry in our communities.”
The Republican supermajority nevertheless moved quickly to remove all three representatives from their committee assignments and then, shockingly, to expel them entirely from the House. At that last session and vote, Jones was offered a chance to defend himself. “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy,” he said.
Pearson brought real fire and eloquence to the proceedings in a speech, reminding the assembled lawmakers that he was being expelled for protesting, “in a country that was built on a protest.” He continued,
You say, “To protest is wrong, because you ‘spoke out of turn.’ Because ‘you spoke up for people who are marginalized. You spoke up for children who won’t ever be able to speak again. You spoke up for parents who don’t want to live in fear. You spoke up for Larry Thorn who was murdered by gun violence. You spoke up for people that we don’t want to care about.’” In a country built by people who speak out of turn, who spoke out of turn, who fought out of turn to build a nation. I come from a long line of people who have resisted.
Observers had observed quietly and solemnly for hours, even asking those who spoke out during the proceedings to keep silent. But upon the final vote, the crowd broke into chants of “Shame!” and “Fascists!”
GOP leaders said the expulsions were necessary in order to make clear that lawmakers’ disruptions of House proceedings would not be allowed. But it is hardly clear that the first step toward maintaining decorum in the chamber ought to be outright expulsions instead of, say, a censure. The move has an inherent and deeply chilling effect on First Amendment rights and on debate and democracy.
Expulsion is something the Tennessee House has deployed only a handful times since the Civil War. While most state lawmaking bodies have the power to expel members, it’s usually reserved for serious criminal or ethical misconduct. And in Tennessee, that has meant almost no instances where expulsions were enforced, even for serious legal and ethical transgressions.
As lawyer and activist Qasim Rashid correctly observed, the Tennessee House “failed to expel a child molester, failed to expel a woman abuser, failed to expel two reps under federal investigation—but immediately expelled a Black lawmaker who represents TN’s most diverse district.”
The expulsions may not endure for long
On those normally rare occasions when expulsions of House members occur, Tennessee law provides that the county commissions in the expelled members’ districts are responsible for choosing their replacements until a special election can be scheduled. One or both of these commissions could simply choose the expelled member to return, an outcome that is quite possible for Jones, who represents a part of Nashville, but less likely for Pearson who lives in redder Memphis.
In the special election, both expelled representatives would be eligible to run in those races. And under the Tennessee Constitution, lawmakers cannot be expelled for the same action twice.
Court challenges could also reverse the expulsion, but it isn’t clear whether any actions would be pursued or filed immediately.
Tennessee is pushing to the limit, but that’s a gamble easily lost
The actions by the GOP in Tennessee are being closely watched and amplified nationally. The state either will become a cautionary tale about what the GOP ought not to do with unlimited power in the red states, or alternatively a blueprint for what is possible.
If extremists in other states seek to replicate the actions of the GOP in Tennessee, that could produce a nationwide crisis, where Democratic legislators effectively are silenced by being removed for their views and their speech on specious grounds and in violation of norms and precedent.
In fact, the abusive misuse of supermajorities, drawn into and sustained in their power through unfair and undemocratic maps, is playing out in other states already. In Wisconsin, for example, there is talk within the GOP of impeaching the newly elected progressive state Supreme Court justice, Janet Protasiewicz, before she is even seated. In North Carolina, a suspicious party switch by a Democratic assembly member in a solidly blue district gave Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature, and they intend now to enact harsh new anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ and anti-education laws in the state.
When the party in power overreaches and demonstrates its extremism through actions such as these in Tennessee, voters often galvanize against them. That was the painful experience of the GOP recently in both Michigan, where fair maps demanded by the voters returned a Democratic trifecta to power, and in Wisconsin, where Protasiewicz defeated Kelly by a whopping 10 percentage points in a usually evenly divided state. Extreme, anti-democratic moves, taken in plain sight of the voters, can lead to electoral routs.
Jones and Pearson will not cease their efforts to advocate on behalf of gun safety and the students. If anything, they have now gained a national spotlight for their leadership. A fundraiser led by gun safety advocate Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on their behalf brought in over $200,000 overnight, and that’s just the beginning.
During the protests, the students chanted, “You ban books, you ban drag, kids are still in body bags!” Indeed, Nashville has already been in the national news three times this year alone: for the nation’s first ban on public drag performances, for the Covenant School shooting, and now for the expulsion of Democratic lawmakers who joined the students protesting the inaction on guns. Things are reaching a boiling point, and the GOP has shown itself to be increasingly desperate, extreme, and without any real solutions beyond shutting down the ideas and the people who disagree with them.
And that is not a long-term winning strategy, in Tennessee or in the rest of red state America.
It is as you said the other day; as the legitimacy of GOP power dissolves, their efforts to retain it are becoming ever more desperate.
Because they now have the issue of abortion as an albatross around their neck rather than the galvanizing rallying point it was pre-Dobbs, they have had to ramp up such other culture wars issues as they can find in order to appease their ever-shrinking-but-increasingly-truculent base. All that they can find are LGBTQ issues, CRT, guns, and Trump's legal woes. There isn't a public policy worth printing in the batch.
“Nearly 1,400 people die each year in Tennessee by guns”
Why the passive “die” instead of “are killed”?
Dying is a thing that happens in the normal course of events for us all. “Die each year by guns” puts this in the realm of “die each year from cancer”. It makes murders sound like an unfortunate fact of existence rather than the violent violation of a person that it is.
It’s akin to saying “Six people lost their lives in a mass shooting” (careless people, misplacing their lives like that) instead of the vastly more accurate “Six people were murdered...”
We need to stop talking about shootings as if they were something the victims did, or something unfortunate that just happened to happen to them, and acknowledge shootings are a deliberately act of violence done to them.